Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to construct a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.

In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death — an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres, with shifting registers of language and moods that was a trademark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema.

This Kindle edition includes a single illustration from the first edition's original six..

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"The book is a tour de force in that Nezval adopts the genre of the pulp novel for his own arch purposes. Have literary historians noticed that it is a precursor of some of our own aesthetic concerns, in other words a sort of pre-postmodern fantasy?" -- John Taylor, The Antioch Review

"Gothic sleazefest, menstrual fantasy, dime-store pulp fiction Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a collage of a collage of a collage, a dream of a dream, an important early-century surrealist novel only now translated from its native Czech into English by the able David Short." -- New York Press"

"Somewhere between the existential fables of Franz Kafka and the macabre animations of Jan vankmajer lies Vit zslav Nezval. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders reminded me of a hyperactive Hammer Horror film as directed by Luis Bunuel." -- The Absinthe Literary Review"

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Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to construct a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.

In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death — an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres, with shifting registers of language and moods that was a trademark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema.

This Kindle edition includes a single illustration from the first edition's original six..

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4.0 out of 5 starsAiry-Fairy

21 November 2016 - Published on Amazon.com

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This book is very airy-fairy, which I like, It has the same mood as Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" except its more gothic and less childish. Nezval included all of the elements of gothic literature with this one from secret passages to supernatural predators and he did it without being too try-hard. I only gave it 4 stars because, like a lot of translations, the dialogue is kind of flat in places. Also, this is a beautifully printed book but the illustrations are not on the right pages, in the photos you can see that some appear 20+ pages before the depicted moment actually happens in the storyline.

This surrealist story brings Dalí's paintings to mind: absurd and impossible, but so precisely drawn that it captivates the viewer. Instead of linear storytelling with clear premises and resolution, this seems to approach its major characters repeatedly, from different angles, as if trying to find some point of view that Valerie can understand. Instead, the hallucinatory visions circle around the central characters until they evaporate, in the end, like morning fog.

Reading this book might be easiest if you have strong visual imagination. Imagery includes bizarre revival tent exhortations, supernatural transformations, dank crypts, and more. Somehow, these scenes beg to be brought to life.

This isn't for everyone. It leads the reader through a very personal vision, populated by mythic beings of uncertain meaning. If that, plus a vivid pictorial sense can pull you in, then you'll find a remarkable experience between these covers.

Vitezslav Nezval was a leading surrealist writer in a time and place not hospitable to imagination. Faced with an increasingly hostile situation, he chose cooperation over martyrdom and turned his attention to more realistic subject matter. In recent years the Czechs have been re-exploring their literary past and freed from the burden of state-imposed social realism, they have rediscovered their surrealist past. This is at least the third translation of Nezval's works to appear in English, and it may be the most familiar to fans of fantasy since it provided the basis for a well-regarded film of the same name.

The novel itself is a fusion of surrealist dreamtime with the conventions of gothic fiction. Thus Valerie finds herself surrounded by evil relatives, handsome young fellows in distress and a master-criminal/vampire who lives off the blood of chickens--and may be Valerie's father.

"Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" is a good introduction to surrealist fiction, not as demanding as the works produced by Breton, Crevel and other more hardcore members of the movement.

I absolutely love this story. I have described it as Alice in Wonderland for a mature audience with some ...romance? and vampire-like characters thrown in. Just finished it and I think I'm going to read it again. It is an excellent bedtime read.